


Stone Towers

by optimustaud



Series: The Quest [3]
Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Gen, No pairings - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-28 18:10:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3864715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/optimustaud/pseuds/optimustaud
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Black and White live in a castle filled with ghosts.</p><p>Originally posted on ff.net</p><p>Symbolism galore- leave me questions in the comments and I will be happy to answer them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone Towers

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Softly spoken is a Half-truth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3920518) by [fraisemilk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraisemilk/pseuds/fraisemilk). 



The voice of the wind is the voice of the dead and Black knows this better than anybody else. He listens to the voices howl through the great stone halls of his castle. It is a cold, hollow noise that leaves him feeling like an oyster shell drained of all its meat. Still, he sits in his storm damaged library and waits for the chance to listen to the dead. It is the only thing he has left anymore.

 

White barely notices the wind that howls through his castle. Each carefully laid stone block is a key to his prison. The smell of the old stone is all around him; in the dust, in the water, in the narrow streams of light that make their journey through the holed velvet curtains. The scent is everywhere and White cannot escape.

 

White and Black never speak to each other, each has claimed his own territory within the castle and they both respect the invisible boundaries they have set for one another. They move in erratic orbitals, one repelling the other, but neither of them able to pull away from the secret that keeps them bound to the castle. Both of them know this castle is haunted, and both would rather keep the company of ghosts than sit with each other a moment longer than they have to.

 

Black thinks often of the Queen of Carnations, sitting in her throne room, resplendent in a gown of spotless white silk. “It’s better to hurt than to hurt others, “she would say, her throne room filled with the snipsnipsnip of scissors slicing through white paper. He would sit beside the queen and watch, fascinated by the ballet of nimble fingers gracefully forming petals from paper only to let them drop from her fingertips to lay gracefully at her feet.

 

Black watches; watches as she ages, watches as she loses a little more of her life to those flowers. The Queen looks tired, and she stops to ease a cramp out of her fingers. She does not stop working. She does not stop chanting her litany.

 

The bulbous red head of an insect emerges from the Queen’s mouth. The creature pauses for a moment, swaying side to side as it considers its new surroundings. Its legs spasm frantically as it pushes its way out of the Queens mouth. Black gags, unable to look away as the beast crawls across the Queens face. As the creature leaves her mouth the Queen raggedly gasps in a hoarse voice “ . . . be hurt . . . hurt others.” Then another blunt, red head appeared, struggling to breach the hole of her hear, and then from her other ear, and her nostrils and more from her mouth.

 

Finally the Queen stops speaking, the creatures crawl out of her and over her. Her lovely white dress disappeared under the writhing mass of insects. They dropped from her small shoulder, long bodies contorting as they landed, and piled at her feet. They cover the flower strewn floor in a carpet of writhing bodies and spasming limbs.

 

White keeps company with the priest who can always be found in the chapel. The priest dresses in a pristine white suit and reads from a holy book resting on a great stone altar. White listens to his sermons, and learns every word by heart. He knows this is the truth, must be truth because someone so powerful could not be wrong. So he listens half enraptured, half enraged; the hot restlessness crawling over his skin like a swarm. The priest places a rough hand on the top of White’s head while mouthing his benediction, “The weak are violated, trampled, afflicted.”

 

White screams. He pins the priest to the floor and begins to eat in rushed, messy bites. The priest falters, his prayer comes to an end and this time it is the priests turn to scream and White’s turn to listen. Slick satisfaction is warming White’s gut as easily as the meat he is swallowing. The priests flesh tears so easily, its scraps sticking between his teeth as he rips through chewy muscle and slippery fat. The priests’ bones make a satisfying crack beneath his teeth as he sucks at the marrow and crunches through the joints.

 

Finally the chapel is silent and musky with the scent of blood. White licks his fingers, feeling the priest’s strength swell inside of him. He tries to ignore the emptiness growing inside him and the foul taste in his mouth that never completely disappears.

 

There is a little girl with butterfly wings in Black’s damaged library. She works meticulously, gluing damaged bindings back together and hanging thick wet pages of his novels out to dry, hoping to save the words written on the pages. She runs her little fingers over water logged vellum and parchment, desperately searching for clues that will allow her to reconstruct the fading passages. Black feels awful, knowing that these words are lost forever. It breaks him to watch such a fragile child trying so valiantly to glue the pieces back together when he himself had already given up. “Stop this,” he says, “Give up, the damage is too deep.”

 

The girl only smiles at him, her wings fluttering gently in the breeze. “What does this say oniichan?” she asks while pointing to a water stained page. There is no way he can read the fading words so he paraphrases from memory. She carefully transcribes his words onto fresh, dry pages. When the work is done and he turns to leave the butterfly girl wraps her skinny arms around his waist and they pass right through him.

 

White wonders the castle restlessly, the tap of his feet against the stone work jarring in the silence. He finds a knight in the guardhouse. He wears the finest armor and carries a round shield, but no sword. The knight removes his helmet and bows respectfully when White enters. “Before anyone else, I’m going to save you,” the knight says, trembling beneath the weight of his armor. White wonders how the knight will be able to protect anything like that. He feels the priest, growing restless in his belly. He runs from the guard house the desire to protect and to punish warring within him. A part of him knows he should carry out his duty and punish this weak creature, but he never does. He blames Black for this.

 

White flees to the North Tower and sits amongst the ravens. They flock near him; never straying too far, never coming too close. They watch White with marble bright eyes, heads cocked to the side as if in thought. When he leaves the tower the ravens take flight; the rush of their wings and their harsh cries pound in his ears. “stopfighting stopfighting stopfighting,” they call before bursting out of existence in a firework display of dark feathers.

 

Some mornings Black will wake, mouth watering to the scent of rich dark coffee. He follows the scent to a room at the very end of the east wing. He presses his ear to the wood work and listens. There are voices in that room. He presses closer trying to pick them out. An old man, a young man, and a young girl are in there. The old man’s voice is kindly and indulgent, the young man and woman fight in the way he imagines brother and sister would fight. He wants to go to them, to be among them, but the door remains stubbornly locked.

Black goes to the South Tower and surveyed the damage to his home. The outer wall is nearly gone and the draw bridge is nothing more than shattered driftwood floating around his dangerously swollen moat. The inner walls were starting to crumble. The land outside the castle was locked in a deep frost, the town outside his walls had disappeared and all around him was a tundra devoid of life. A flash of movement catches Black’s eyes and he looks down.

 

There is someone standing at the edge of his moat, a bright spot of orange against the pervading gray. The other boy sees Black watching him and start frantically waving his arms. Black is certain he must be shouting, but he cannot hear any words. Black blinks and the image fades.

 

When the night is very dark and still the wind carries a voice up through the stone foundations of the castle. The voice groans and sobs and begs to die. Black places his hands over his ears and pretends not to hear it, White retreats to the North Tower to watch the ravens. This is the secret, the nucleus that binds Black and White together.

 

Deep in the bowels of the castle is the ghost they both hear by never speak of. He is a prisoner in the dungeon. His eyes have been gouged out and replaced with rusted bolts. His finger and toes have been pruned from his body. Sometimes the prisoner speaks through the sobs and cracked lips and broken teeth. “475 . . . 468 . . . 461 . . . 454.” He squirms and sobs and bleeds insanity as insects crawl over his flesh and centipedes burrow in his ears.

 

Neither Black nor White have the courage to face the prisoner so he sits alone and blind in the dungeon. The centipedes burrow through the walls to reach him until one day the foundation cracks and the castle falls.

**Author's Note:**

> I finally went ahead and posted this after sitting on top of it for months. I finally reached the point where I just could not edit it any more. I really struggled with everything from formatting to which characters I should include. This story used to be twice the length, but I felt it dragged on too long and lost some of the impact. This was meant to be a bit of a mind palace story and I wanted it to come across a bit detached and disjointed. I think I have only managed to make it confusing. Feedback is appreciated. This story is a bit out of my comfort area and I would like to know what you all think of it.


End file.
